Re: Re: Assignment 1: Beauty n d Beast

#19323
Duncan Rawlinson
Keymaster

Great work.

You’ve accomplished exactly what you were supposed to with this assignment. I see this assignment forced you to think about composition and the process of image simplification. You’ve decided to move your camera closer to your main object which allowed you better control over the composition of the photograph.

It allowed you to remove any unnecessary secondary elements from your background, further isolate your main foreground object and further control your color palette to a series of gradients in the white, brown and red hues. Great work.

This all being said, it’s also important that you know that you don’t need to work in close up photography to achieve this level of control. As time passes I’d like to see you become brave with your composition and experiment with using larger geographic space. There isn’t a rush however, and using close up / macro photograph for the fist few assignments is a great way to practice the technical ideas in each lesson without having to worry as much about space.

My only concern with the image is that you’ve “amputated” (i.e. cut off) your object’s reflection with the bottom frame of the photograph. The reflection is one of the photographs main objects and it’s in perfect focus and therefore you must treat this object with great care. You’ve seem to have placed too much of your attention on the composition of the center of the image, while accidentally ignoring the composition around the edges (especially the bottom wall of the photograph).

It’s not necessarily wrong what you’ve done. Photographers must amputate objects all of the time. But it’s not often seen with still life photography or with the main object of your photograph. It’s usually with contextual, out of focus background objects.

Look at the following two photographs for example. Notice not only do they have strong compositions, limited objects and a simplified color palettes, but they also treat their reflection with the same compositional attention as they treat their main subject (i.e. they wouldn’t amputate the reflections limbs or important parts of the object).

http://www.lesmoorephoto.com/galleryimages/6213_notchtop_reflection.jpg

Another example

http://photo.net/general-comments/attachment/2225504/silhouette.jpg

I hope this helps!